How to plan for your digital death

Here’s how to plan for your digital death

Lesson summary

Hi there everyone, it’s Jeff and this is Plain English, where JR and I help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. This is lesson number 486, so you can find today’s lesson at PlainEnglish.com/486.

Last Thursday, we talked about what happens to your online accounts after you die . And it may have left you a little unsatisfied. That’s because, if you don’t plan ahead, you don’t have any control over what happens to your social media accounts, computer files, photos, and emails.

After researching last week’s lesson, I felt a little overwhelmed. It sounds like a lot of work to prepare for your digital death—a lot of work that, let’s be honest, most of us don’t want to do.

So today, we’re going to talk about how you can plan your digital death. And the good news is, it’s not too hard. In the second half of the lesson, I’ll show you how to use the English expression, “up to date.”

In the second half, we also have a quote of the week. And related to the quote of the week, I have a special gift for you. So sometimes you get to the end of a podcast episode, you just stop listening before the end. You can do that on most days, but don’t do it today or you’ll miss out on a free gift that I have for you. Got it? Listen to the end! Now we’re ready.

Planning your digital death

Let’s start by talking about access. If you died today, would anyone be able to get into your most important accounts? You might remember that in Lesson 326, I recommended that you use a password manager . These programs generate and store passwords. But they can also serve as a digital vault of important information. And most commercial password managers allow you to appoint an emergency contact. The settings vary, but by setting an emergency contact in your password manager, you guarantee that your emergency contact has access to your most important accounts. This covers access to your computer, your phone, and online services.

To put your mind at ease, the password managers have implemented several security settings to prevent someone from accessing the account in a non-emergency. So the first step to planning your digital death is to use a password manager and appoint an emergency contact.

But there’s more than just access. How would you like your social media profiles to look? Facebook lets you choose a “legacy contact.” Your legacy contact is someone who can administer your account after you die. By that I mean, the legacy contact can change your profile from an active profile to a “memorialized” profile, if that’s what you want. That person can then monitor the posts on your account, change your profile photo, and handle incoming messages. Or, your legacy contact can delete your profile altogether . I just appointed a legacy contact; it took exactly one minute.

For most people, Facebook will be enough. You don’t need to manage a lot of accounts—just choose the one account that has the most important people in it. If that’s another service, though, you’ll have to work a little harder. Other social media accounts, like Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter, don’t let you appoint a legacy contact. The best way to manage these accounts is leave specific instructions to another person—more on that later.

Next up is e-mail. If you don’t use e-mail for meaningful correspondence with friends and family, you might not need to worry too much about it. But if you have messages to and from other people that you’d like to be preserved, or if you’d like to send a message to your contacts, then you should plan ahead. Google lets you appoint up to ten people who can access your account upon your death. But Google is the exception. Most services don’t let you appoint a legacy contact, but you can leave access instructions in your password manager.

The bigger issue, however, is that only you know where the good e-mails are. For example, I have tens of thousands of saved emails—maybe over a hundred thousand by now. Some would be of value to others—my correspondence with family and friends over the years might be of comfort to the people who survive me. But if they’re not organized, they’ll be lost—even if someone gets access to my accounts.

If you have emails that you’d like to be preserved, it’s best to create a special folder with meaningful messages. Take some time every year—maybe around the holidays—to add the messages that are truly meaningful. Then, in your instructions to your family, tell them about the folder.

The same advice goes for files. I hate to break it to you, but most of the files in your Dropbox or your Google Drive are of no interest to anyone else. But if you have family photos, videos, or important documents, leave instructions about where to find the files that would be valuable to others.

So I keep saying, “tell your heirs” this, or “leave instructions” about that. How exactly do you do that? If you have a will, you can leave specific instructions about how to manage your accounts in there. Write a nice long letter and say exactly what you want to happen. Say, “The messages in the folder marked ‘Preserve’ should be downloaded and given to this relative. All other messages should be deleted.” Or, you can say, “Send the following post to Facebook and then memorialize my account. Use this photo as my final profile photo.” Just like that. And then find some quiet time to tell people in your life that you’ve left instructions for them in your will.

If you don’t have a will, you can still do this. I would recommend putting this letter in a box or a binder in a place that’s easy to find. Tell one or two relatives where to find the information in your house.

Some of you might have a more complicated digital life—you might have a blog, you might have an online business, you might have a lot of data on a genealogy site, maybe you have cryptocurrency, what have you. The more complicated your digital life, the more detailed your instructions should be.

But it doesn’t have to be too much. Just think about what’s important—not what’s important to you, because you’ll be dead. Think about what others might want to have. What would give them comfort? What photos would they like to have? What would you want your blog readers to know? It’s probably not a whole lot, in the end. But if you invest a little bit of time every year to keep this information up to date , you can have the digital legacy you desire.

My game plan

I took a look through my password manager, just to get a sense of how many accounts might be useful to someone on my death. Aside from Plain English, it isn’t much. Emails, yes. Files, yes. One social media account. Maybe my frequent flyer miles. That’s it.

So, I am going to do this. Like I said, I just appointed a legacy contact on Facebook. I’ll set up an emergency contact in LastPass. I’ll find the e-mails that are from important people in my history and save them in a folder. And I’ll write this letter, too, with full instructions. I’ll do this probably over the holidays this year.